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Philosophy of The Matrix
Deep Meaning in the Films. Gnosticism, God and Biocentrism.
The Personal Impact of the Matrix Films
When the first Matrix movie arrived in theaters in 1999, I really had no idea how impactful that film and the two sequels that would follow it would become both to me personally and to many in Western culture as a whole. At about the same time as the first film’s initial release, my father began to succumb to the cancer that would end his life later in the year, something I was completely unprepared for. So this was all an ominous time of great uncertainty for me.
In the films, there are many parallels to religious or spiritual concepts, teachings or cosmology from the likes of Buddhism, Gnosticism, Hinduism, and Christianity, and much has already been said about all of that elsewhere that I won’t go into here.
I came to see the movie trilogy ending with Revolutions — yes, I’m ignoring the recent fourth movie here — as a body of richly meaningful mythology, a viewpoint that has been pooh-poohed by some critics elsewhere. Oh well, their loss. By mythology, I mean stories that are richly symbolic or archetypal and that hold diverse possibilities for philosophical interpretations and personal spiritual illumination or enrichment.
It’s been said that Morpheus was the god of dreams. That’s what his namesake in our world was. In the first film, the things Morpheus was teaching Neo made Morpheus the One already. The One was already there, and he was Morpheus. The One led Neo to also become the One. In the original, Morpheus had it and Neo didn’t, until the end. Except… then how did Morpheus get beaten and captured? Maybe it was a role he took on to help bring the One into being in Neo. What an amazing taking off point that could’ve been for more of the story — an escalation of the Identity of the One amongst increasing numbers of people. Instead, we got Smith becoming a virus and doing the opposite — all the people becoming one person, and the One becoming “one program” among many within the system of control built by the Architect ( / Archon). Okay, I suppose we still got a brighter emergence of the One as Neo eventually defied the Architect’s system of control, but it sure was a big detour.
